China's Export of SARS/CoV-2 Under State Wraps

 

“I would like to sincerely thank all the netizens and people from all walks of life who have supported me and my team for a long time.”

“I won’t leave, I won’t quit, I am pursuing science and the truth! The Public Health Center are refusing to let me and my students go in the laboratory and take shelter.”

“I trusted myself. I have so much experience, my team has made so many discoveries over the years, that we were able to make accurate judgments.”

Dr. Zhang Yongzhen, research virologist, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

A security guard stands outside a wet market in Wuhan linked to some of the earliest known cases of Covid-19. Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

When the World Health Organization issued its pandemic alert globally, scientists everywhere lauded the swift assistance they were given when the SARS/CoV-2 sequencing was distributed worldwide, enabling pharmaceutical companies an early start on their search for an effective and reliable vaccine against the dread COVID-19 virus that lost no time escaping its place of origin in Wuhan, China, replicating itself and infecting people all over the world with utterly disastrous results in illness and death. 

But the release of the sequencing was not the result of a conscientious leadership in Beijing, anxious to help the world cope with an impending natural disaster of a virus leaping from wild animals to humans with a consequential human-to-human infectiousness that soon saw Europe brought to its knees, attempting to stem the tide of an implacable pathogen, leaving hospitals overcome with new patients, incapable of tending to the needs of the infected, speedily leaving countries with soaring death rates.

Dr. Zhang's generosity of spirit in releasing the priceless data was a lifesaver, enabling researchers to formulate a vaccine to help stave off the infection for a large proportion of the world's population, as the virus underwent various mutations that made it ever more infectious and dangerously lethal in the numbers it was infecting. Beijing, however, was anything but pleased with the release of the sequencing. It had not given its assent and regarded the fact that Dr. Zhang and his colleagues sent out 'proprietary' data in the name of open science and a true regard for the welfare of humanity, an unforgivable insubordination.

The result was that Dr. Zhang, his research team and any who were associated with them were harassed, pressured and punished. Once the sequencing had been completed in Dr. Zhang's laboratory, Chinese authorities were notified of the dangerous and lethal nature of the coronavirus and the urgency to act. What Chinese authorities were interested in was maintaining an aura of secrecy, more invested in seeing that the global community not become aware that a globe-threatening virus had come out of China leaving them with no intention of alerting the WHO and by extension the world community.

Nothing has changed since then. From hampering international investigations, refusing to permit investigators from the WHO open access to the Wuhan Market, much less the Wuhan Institute of Virology, withholding scientific papers, and controlling what investigators could see, who they could interview and what they could have access to in the interests of discovering the source of the virus, Beijing still maintains that the virus might have entered China from elsewhere.

Now, Dr. Zhang has found himself and his colleagues locked out of their laboratory as Beijing continues to repress those scientists conducting ongoing research on the coronavirus. Having been abruptly notified that they were being evicted from their lab, the most recent setback to the researchers after demotions and ousters since the sequence was published in January of 2020, the latest assault on open science has left Dr. Zhang helpless, with guards barring entry to his lab.

He did not go quietly and accept the inevitable, but has since been protesting, sitting outside his lab, sleeping on the ground in the rain overnight on Monday. The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center claimed in an online statement on Chinese social media platform Weibo that the lob was in the process of renovation and therefore closed for "safety reasons", and Dr. Zhang's team had been provided with an alternative laboratory. Dr. Zhang on the other hand, denied an alternative had been offered until after their eviction.Moreover the lab in question failed to meet the safety standards required for conducting the type of research that they were engaged in.

From the very first weeks of the viral outbreak in China, its government froze domestic and international efforts to trace its source, a pattern that continues. Labs have been closed, collaborations with other, foreign scientists have been blocked, foreign scientists were forced to leave, while Chinese researchers found themselves barred from leaving the country. And Dr.Zhang finds himself now in a position where he is under close scrutiny and communicating with outside, unauthorized sources forbidden to him.

The virologist Zhang Yongzhen is staging a sit-in protest after Chinese authorities allegedly locked him out of his lab.